


let the only sound be the overflow

by RaisingCaiin



Series: RC's Back to Middle-earth Month 2020 [3]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: As One Does, Embodiment is weird and Mairon never fully gets used to it, Gen, Gratuitous Screwtape Letters references because that's how I roll, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mortality, Númenor, Philosophizing in the face of imminent demise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:14:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23089942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/pseuds/RaisingCaiin
Summary: Mairon stumbles on the steps of the temple as Numenor sinks, and for the first time in his existence, his hands are shaking.(for the B2MeM prompt 3/6/2020:"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses. / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." - Walt Whitman, excerpt from “Song of Myself”)
Series: RC's Back to Middle-earth Month 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653583
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26
Collections: Back to Middle-earth Month 2020: Endings and Beginnings





	let the only sound be the overflow

This was not meant to be the way that it ends, although indeed, it was never meant to end at all. Death is the condition of mortals, those disgusting amphibians whose lot is half that of the spirit with its place in the eternal but also half that of the animal who inhabits time.

Death was certainly never meant to be his lot, pure spirit as he is. But this meat, this stinking animal skin that he had draped over himself so that he could walk among them as a part of their number, does not seem to know as much, and it _panics panics panics_ as its feet trip upon the steps leading up into the temple of Bauglir. Its hands are skinned against the stone, its eyes behold the wave that has been raised to destroy the Island, and its every mechanism is rendered _useless._

And worse, when he raises those same hands, intending to dismiss this useless bipedal flesh now that it has served its purpose - he finds that he cannot. Something sinks within him as he tries again, and again, to the same non-result. His spirit, it seems, has been bound to the flesh it lies beneath, and neither part will now depart the shape into which he had conditioned them only three cycles of the seasons ago. 

Abruptly he is put in mind of blackened hands, limping feet, jewel-blinded eyes - remembers watching them flake apart, drain away, bleed out into the matter of the world until their wearer was no better than a mortal Himself, and so had deserved to have the limbs hewn from His torso, His useless ugly iron crown hammered into a collar then soldered shut about His neck. 

He had disdained Him, then. Sneered at how far He had fallen. Promised himself that he would not make the same mistakes as his erstwhile second Master had and would, in fact, outshine Him entirely soon enough. 

The body’s hands are shaking when he looks upon them now, for lack of other things to try. They have never shaken before, the agitation of his spirit spilling out into the matter he wears upon it in such an unseemly loss of control. Distantly, he thinks that he does not much like this; more distantly still, he wonders what it would take to make it stop. 

The roaring of the swell has grown in volume now, the great wave rushing ever closer, rising ever higher. It mounts and swells and nears until the salt-brine stink of so much sea fills his nose, and the thunder of it all presses so unbearably against the fragile, tight-stretched drums within his ears that they feel as if they must burst. 

If he is pulled beneath the waves in this fair form, he knows, then he will not rise from it intact. Perhaps he will not rise from it at all. 

But he has not the time or strength to regain his battered feet before the great wave is crashing against the Island of the Star. Its roaring waters swallow up the firth, the port, the docks below golden Armenelos, and then they are _rising rising rising_ into the city itself, sweeping away all that lies in their path as they race toward the temple, where still he sprawls in shock, rooted like an animal against the stone of its carven steps. 

Neither the innocent nor the aged are safe from the wounded pride of the One, he supposes with detachment. The screams of the people fall silent, street by drowned street, but then, is that not always the way of it? The gods will have what the gods did want, and any who seek to live their lives beneath their heavy aegis, or to improve the world of its unneeded shadow, will surely die for their presumption. 

Up the steps the water rushes now, its cold and terrible touch unmistakable against the shivering flesh that he cannot escape now. The body’s lungs tremble with fear and anger intermixed as he draws what he knows must be its last breath, which he will use to scream his imprecations against the cowardly divinities who would not face him or his armies in battle, but must go whining to the One for protection against a fight won fair. 

And then the ocean has taken him too, the weight of the water knocking words and breath alike from the body he had only planned to wear awhile. 

He does not intend to close its eyes - let no one say that even the Admirable could not face death - but the weak and paltry animal of his adopted flesh cannot withstand the pressure, and closes its eyes for him. 

He is pulled below, and he cannot open them again.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Florence + The Machine's "What The Water Gave Me"


End file.
